Wednesday, February 5, 2014

"All the calculations about who gets what slice of the public cake are based on what the Treasury warlocks call 'identifiable expenditure'. But identifiable expenditure is far from being the whole story. According to the white paper on the government's expenditure plans, the identifiable expenditure for 1988-89 was £129.83bn, of which Scotland's share was £14.291bn (or 11%). But the UK's total public spending was £161.617bn, leaving a whopping £31.780bn 'not identified'. So where did all these billions go? All the evidence suggests that much of it (and probably most of it) went into London and the south-east."
George Rosie, writing a quarter of a century ago as he famously 'Scotched the Myth' that Scotland is subsidised by London, rather than the other way round.